Walking The Mirror's Edge

Mirror’s Edge will be 14 years old this year and it still has some of the best movement ever put into the medium. The parkour mechanics intertwine to create a wonderful environment of puzzles solved by momentum. Running on the roof-tops, maintaining momentum by rolling out of jumps, and taking leaps of faith¹ are so smooth that you can almost forget there’s another half to the game.

The other half of the game contains basic combat which is purposefully clunky so that the player focuses more on movement than fighting. You cannot run while holding a weapon, the gun-play is not smooth, and generally the weapons are treated as a way to ease your progress throughout the levels featuring combat. This isn’t a bad thing. The game designers want the player to engage with the parkour mechanics since they are the focal point of the game loop.

The issue is one of balance: the story they wished to tell requires some form of conflict which in turn requires enemies that can attack the player. This need to lean into conflict causes the back half of the game to sink into a mire of combat levels. In so doing the game is forced to lean into the weaker elements it delivers.

This brings up what I think is an important decision game design teams face: what changes when the story and game-play are in tension? More generally, what do you do when two elements of a game’s design experience tension?

You can guarantee that at some point every game will have components exerting pressure on each other, but there is no single answer to this question. In the case of Mirror’s Edge the game designers chose to prioritize the story instead of solving the tension between it and the existing game mechanics. Had the designers chosen to solve the tension Mirror’s Edge could have been a beautiful parkour puzzle game in a manner similar to Portal. That would have made it a masterpiece.

Of course, I have the benefit of 14 years of hindsight and it is difficult to make these kinds of decisions in the middle of development. So what I’m left with is the best parkour mechanics ever put into the medium surrounded by a game leaning away from it. Walking the Mirror’s Edge² of game design is often tricky.